Whether it be the practice of art, music or writing, creative people are always seeking inspiration for their next body of work, but artist
Lisa Roet
never once thought hers would come from an aorta transplant.

She says life-changing open heart surgery last November gave her new impetus to launch two new projects this year, one large and one small-scale, aimed at generating interest and new markets for her sculpture, drawings and public commissions.

“There has definitely been a burst of ­creativity as a result," says a smiling Roet who, just four months on, appears to be in glowing good health and energised by the success of her remarkable half-human, half-gorilla heart installation in Melbourne’s Forum Theatre for the recent Nuit Blanche (White Night) overnight art festival. She says about 20 per cent of the 550,000 visitors to the Melbourne central business district saw the six-metre high holygram, featuring sound and video projection, during the showing from 7pm to 7am one Saturday night in February. The featured heart was a hybrid mix of her own and a gorilla heart.

“I eventually will have animal valves put into my heart. My art work always has something of interest that reflects back on humans. It is a metaphor for what’s going on around me and it helps me work out what makes us different to other animals."

Roet took just one month off work after surgery before returning to her inner Melbourne studio to complete the heart project. Her Melbourne art dealer, Karen Woodbury, describes her as “unstoppable". She was paid a one-off, undisclosed fee for a project estimated to have cost anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 to produce. Roet collaborated with a team of scientists from Britain doing research into gorilla health.

“These are not commercial projects," she concedes. “But the vision helps show a new market that you can work in other ways."

Her smaller-scale, commercial collaboration follows the example of international contemporary artists working with fashion houses, including Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami at Louis Vuitton, Anish Kapoor for Bulgari and Damien Hirst for Alexander McQueen.

Wearable Art

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By mid-year Roet will launch her “wearable art" – bracelets depicting gibbon fingers around the wrist and other objects, for Melanie Katsalidis, of Melbourne fashion house Pieces of Eight. Prices will start about $200.

For the past 25 years, Roet has been focused on depicting apes, gibbons and chimpanzees – prices range from $6000 for smaller drawings of ape fingers to $15,000 for a two by three-metre work. Ceramic or bronze sculptures of busts, fingers or hands cost from $70,000 to $250,000.

Roet, in her mid-40s, is married with an 11-year-old son and is represented by commercial galleries Karen Woodbury in ­Melbourne and Hugo Michell in Adelaide.

Sales of her work are through exhibitions, commissions, editions (where one work can be reproduced multiple times) and from the stock room. A commercial exhibition with Deutscher and Hackett in Sydney in 2012 sold about 40 per cent of available works ranging from etchings at $1500 to a bronze spider monkey sculpture for $75,000.

Roet also has won a total of about $300,000 in art prize money in the past 10 years, including the prestigious McLelland Sculpture prize in 2003, worth $100,000, and the now discontinued National Sculpture Prize, worth $50,000. “I have been lucky to have won wealthy prizes which have helped my career immensely," she says. “That money gets reinvested into creating more work. I cannot think about profit. I only think about how to achieve my best results."

Among her recent commissions are a $200,000, four-metre high bronze ape finger, unveiled this month at a new RMIT campus in Bundoora, Melbourne. A smaller bronze finger, worth about $70,000, was donated to the Adelaide Zoo and launched two years ago by the venerable primatologist and anthropologist Dame Jane Goodall. “I was almost hyper-ventilating. Her work has been an absolute inspiration for me."

Passion came early

Roet’s passion for the animal kingdom – or, more particularly, the apes – started with her high school art teacher who ignited an interest in both art and anthropology.

With a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from RMIT, Roet went to Europe about 1986 on as a “bohemian voyage of self-discovery". She studied in Italy before settled “in a squat in Berlin, with no heating, where I lived virtually hand to mouth for about four years". She worked an evening shift in a cafe, and would do drawing or sculpture until dawn.

During the day she went to the West Berlin Zoo to study the elephants or the apes. When the Berlin Wall came down late 1989, Roet split her time between the east and west Berlin zoos, doing early drawings of elephant trunks or sculptures of animal hearts and brains in wax, hair and wire. She sold works in local galleries for about $500, using old paper from deserted factories.

German immigration delivered another life-changing moment after they found she had outstayed her visa and sent her back to Melbourne in 1993. She launched her work using pop-up art shows, publicised through her network of friends across Melbourne, and sold out of her drawings or small ceramic works for $1200 to $1500.

Roet plans her next commercial show with Woodbury later in the year. It could include painted works for the first time. Her theme will still explore a world where humans connect with the apes. Collaboration is key, whether it be with Coates & Wood, the foundry which does her bronze moulds and casting, with scientists, or with the gallerists who promote her work.

Says Woodbury: “This is a very serious relationship and not one that is taken lightly – while Lisa lives, breathes and eats her practice, so does the gallery. It is not just a business. There is great financial investment, but there is great emotional investment too."